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> Reddit works because it’s anonymous Are you sure there? Anonymity doesn't really exist anymore on the internet for the average person. Reddit has the illusio
by cuddlypsycho 8y ago
> Reddit works because it’s anonymous
Are you sure there? Anonymity doesn't really exist anymore on the internet for the average person. Reddit has the illusion of anonymity which gives its users a false sense of privacy so they can act the way they truly are (parallels to Westworld if you watch the show).
It would be incredibly easy for Reddit to de-anonymize its user base, the same way Facebook was trying to do with medical metadata, and sell that info (at least for the US users, given GDPR in EU now)
- nicky0 8y agoPseudonymous then. P.s. Facebook doesn't sell data. It sells ads, targeted using the data it holds.
- emn13 8y agoFacebook effectively sells data. It simply doesn't sell raw dumps. The distinction isn't a minor one, but in this context it doesn't much matter. Reddit is unlikely to have the kind of quality data that facebook has to sell - directly, or indirectly.
- cm2012 8y agoI would say there are huge privacy differences between selling data and selling the right to advertise to their private data. The latter is quite a bit more privacy secure. (Note, the Cambridge Analytica stuff happened in 2013 when Facebook was much more open with APIs using their data, since popular demand at the time was for FB to be less of a walled garden)
- Retric 8y agoEven just targeted advertising is enough. Setup a campaign landing page for each campaign and anyone that clicks the link just exposed their gender or any other criteria you set up when defining the campaign.
- cryptoz 8y ago> Reddit is unlikely to have the kind of quality data that facebook has to sell - directly, or indirectly. It's a different kind of data. Spez claims to know his user's "dark secrets" and that can be an ad-tech advantage for Reddit. [1] [1] https://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2016/05/30/reddit-knows-your-dark-secrets/ https://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2016/05/30/reddit-knows-y...
- exelius 8y agoWhat if you use Reddit the way I do when posting anonymously: I post on throwaway accounts and delete the accounts every few weeks. The account names aren’t saved in the posts, and the posts aren’t linked in any visible way. I’m sure Reddit has code in the back end to track people, but afaik thanks to Reddit’s general lack of ads, there just aren’t a ton of DMPs, so there aren’t a lot of data points to correlate with.
- pacala 8y agoIP, browser signature, topic browsing patterns, linguistic mannerisms. Not too hard.
- TheForumTroll 8y agoI think GP meant anonymous to other users - not Reddit itself.
- AlexandrB 8y agoNot too hard for reddit, hard enough for the average user. This means that for the purposes of having a conversation with someone else, you're basically anonymous. It's the same level of anonymity that web forums had back in the day before all user-created content started ending up on Facebook and it's progeny.
- exelius 8y agoRight but I think their picture will be disjointed and incomplete. Something like 99% of all users are lurkers who never post a single comment.
- nightski 8y agoIf you are mostly a lurker that probably works great. But I have found that the most influential/upvoted posts tend to come from established accounts with higher karma.
- exelius 8y agoJust like Twitter; but most of those millions of eyeballs aren’t posting anything.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- stale2002 8y agoI don't care it I am not anonymous to Reddit. I care that the average person, reading my comments, doesn't immediately know who I am.
- volkl48 8y agoYou can make a new user account on Reddit in 30 seconds and don't even need an email (last I checked). Pretty easy to maintain a significant degree of anonymity by just deleting your account and making a new one. With that said, most users are more concerned about being anonymous to their peers in conversation than they are to Reddit's administration itself, IMO.
- GSimon 8y agoNow they ask for e-mail before you can sign up, but you don t have to go to your inbox to activate you accounts so basically it's the same.
- txcwpalpha 8y agoYou can leave the email box blank and still sign up with only username and password with no problem.
- function_seven 8y agoIt's a dark pattern. They pop up a dialog with just an email field and a [Next] button. Makes you think you have to enter something before you proceed. But you can leave it blank and move to the username/password stage.
- anchpop 8y agoWhy is that a dark pattern? Seems the same as almost every other site, except with the relaxation of the requirement for an email
- function_seven 8y agoNotice all the sibling comments that insist the email is required now? It’s an understandable misread of that sign up flow. Only one field and then a Next button. Almost no other input flow allows you to hit “next” when the only form field hasn’t been addressed yet. Why not put username, password, and email on one page instead of splitting it up the way they do? Then you can mark the two fields as required and the third as optional.